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Topic: Slurs and triplet brackets - oddities and wishes (Read 4164 times) previous topic - next topic

Slurs and triplet brackets - oddities and wishes

Merry Christmas to one and all!

There are a couple of new slur quirks I don't think we've mentioned before.   I'm not sure if the bit I've marked gold in the attached image is correct or incorrect, but it's eyecatching (meaning it looks wrong to me).  Meanwhile any ideas of how to make it look better without changing the B flat to stem up would be welcome. 

The triplet brackets I've marked in yellow seem to be wrongly placed in relation to the slur arc. I think they should be closer to the beamed notes, with the arc going over, not under.  Workarounds welcomed, please.

Triplets - take a look at the triplets I've marked in green.  I'd like to able to override the default direction, so they can be placed above, not below, the notes if that is my preference. I assume that's feasible to program, since we can already do that with slurs, ties and lyrics.

I would also like to be able to adjust the slope of the triplet brackets so one starting on a rest that is part of an ascending or descending sequence would have the same slope as the rest of the triplets in that sequence.  Maybe the way to do that would be to have phantom stem lengths and directions for rests.  Again, suggestions for workarounds are welcome.   



Re: Slurs and triplet brackets - oddities and wishes

Reply #1
[glow=white,2,900]Merry Christmas![/glow]
Just a bit off the topic.

I always want wishes just like you, remember about a post much earlier about futures?

BTW Eric would be the Santa Claus here, let's see what can he do.

Kris

Re: Slurs and triplet brackets - oddities and wishes

Reply #2
I agree that tuplet brackets should not move to avoid slurs. IMO, this is a bug.
Slurs may pass through brackets. See <this> attachment from G. Schimer.

I was able to fix the first bracket in m16 by setting the stem direction on the Rest and sending it far to the south. This looks good to me. For the 2nd bracket, I moved the notes to the slur staff, and flipped the stems. The vertical position of each end can be manipulated by changing the stem lengths. To get visible notes with no bracket on the main staff, I made a RestChord triplet and dispatched the Rests far to the north. This affects playback, so the actual playing notes are on the slur staff.

As to the slurs themselves, no software is going to position them correctly by default. I moved them all to a slur staff. It took few hours to tweak them. I would expect to spend no less time in another notation editor. If you want to see a bit of how this staff is constructed, select it all, and change the blank space noteheads to X-heads. To be visible, slur originations have to be on visible notes/rests. This is unfortunate. IMO, it would be better to have slurs visible by default and have the Slur options be: default, flipped, hidden (instead of: Default, Upward, Downward). While in a slur, the first note of each measure needs to be visible otherwise, if there is SysBreak, the slur disappears!

NoteWorthy still has some work to do on where slurs end:
Quote
!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.0,Single)
|Note|Dur:4th,Slur|Pos:0|Opts:Stem=Up,Slur=Upward
|RestChord|Dur:Whole|Opts:Stem=Down|Dur2:Whole|Pos2:4
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End
This is clearly a bug. The slur must end at the center of the notehead, not to its right. I put the workaround to this on a separate staff, in hopes that it will be fixed. (current nwc2.exe product version: 2.04.00)

Of course, now that the single visible staff is composed of layers, I needed to "whiteout" the silly sytemic bar line. I put this on a separate staff in hopes that someday this very annoying problem will be addressed. Two staves are all that is really needed here, the two "BugFix" staves can be easily incorporated into the slur and main staff.

The slurs in m16-17 are a matter of taste. I think they look best this way, but they probably should be in the opposite direction of the ties to avoid confusion. NoteWorthy doesn't (yet) support slurs like these, so they needed clipped with some "digital whiteout".

I am not certain about the slur end in m15. Perhaps it should end at the center of the notehead. I added a barline in m16, and a tie from the Dnat in m13 to the Dnat in m15. It seemed like they should be there. You didn't specify an instrument or transposition. I chose a sax with no transposition.

Merry Christmas, David
Registered user since 1996

Re: Slurs and triplet brackets - oddities and wishes

Reply #3
Thank you, Rick, I'm going to look carefully at what you've done, and I'm going to learn. 

As to instrumentation, the image was actually extracts from two parts - Harry Carney's bass clarinet solo in Duke Ellington's Fantazm and a third trumpet part from the same chart, transcribed by a British bandleader who sent it to me in Finale.  I exported from Finale 2002 to midi, and am now importing that so I can move parts around - my instrumentation changes from year to year and, for instance, right now I have a french horn player covering the valve trombone part. I prefer working in NWC2 and can't see the point to upgrading Finale only to allow me to create an XML file to import to NWC2; Finale's expensive and hard to work with from the little I've tried to do with it.

Many thanks, once again.